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Invention: VoIP mangling

VoIP mangling

By Barry Fox

A patent application from German company Infineon reveals a technology for deliberately interfering with internet telephony transmissions – or “voice over IP” (VoIP).

The application doesn’t expand on why it would be used. But it could conceivably come in handy for any company that operates both phone and internet services and would like to protect their phone business from the growing popularity of VoIP.

According to the application, a machine on a computer network would analyse passing “packets” of information, distinguishing between data and voice ones. After identifying a series of voice packets, it would add extra “pseudo-packets” to the communications stream. These packets would be labelled as voice but actually contain nothing useful.

Next, a filter within the same device would let the data packets through unhindered but create an artificial bottleneck for anything labelled as voice. The mix of genuine voice packets and pseudo-packets would thus be delayed as well. The delay should be more than VoIP software can cope with, meaning the resulting speech flutters and warbles when decoded at the other end.

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Ingeniously, the pseudo-packets could be filtered out before the leaving the network machine, providing no evidence of why speech quality is so poor. Infineon has filed another patent in Germany that covers methods of degrading speech sent via a WiFi hot spot, too.

Electronics watchdog

Burglars should be less likely to steal electronics equipment if they know it will refuse to work once it leaves home. At least, so reckons French company Thomson, which has filed a patent application for a system that keeps watch over every piece of electronic equipment in a house.

The watchdog device would contain a secret code and could be hidden somewhere in the house or inside an apparently ordinary domestic appliance. Every electronic gadget in the house would also include a circuit that communicates with the watchdog device via electrical pulses sent over the mains system.

When a new piece of equipment is brought home and plugged in, it would automatically pick up the watchdog code. From then on, every time it is switched on, the device will checks that it can still pick up the code and only work if it can.

If a thief steals any piece of protected equipment it will refuse to work when plugged into a different mains supply. The only way to beat the system would be to steal the watchdog device too, which means stealing everything that is plugged into the mains. It’s not clear what you ought to do if you want to take your TV over to a friend’s house though…

Cool clothing

Research funded by NASA could make life much more comfortable for anyone who has to wear bulky protective clothing. This means not just astronauts, but also fire-fighters, soldiers, and deep sea divers.

Protective suits can easily get too hot or too cold, but the new NASA-backed design promises to regulate a person’s body temperature more efficiently. It would do so by targeting those areas that most effectively exchange heat.

The new suit would resemble a surfer’s wet suit and contain pipes filled with conductive fluid linked to heat exchange coils. However, these exchange coils would only be positioned over those areas of their body best at transferring heat. The heat exchangers could then draw heat away from the body, or warm it up, more effectively, and the suit should be lighter and more comfortable to wear.

As a general rule, bone and blood vessels are good while muscle and fat is bad. So the exchangers would cover areas like the face, groin and chest but not the buttocks or any big biceps. But users could theoretically have suits tailored to their own temperature conducting body hot spots.

Sensors on the user’s finger tips would keep track of temperature. An astronaut facing the hot Sun, for example, could even have heat transferred via the exchange coils from their hot front to their cooler rear, using the suit.

For more than 30 years, Barry Fox has trawled through the world’s weird and wonderful patent applications, uncovering the most exciting, bizarre or even terrifying new ideas. Read previous invention columns, including&colon;